Psychoanalysis confronting colonialism and racism

Psychoanalysis has many sources. Among them is the kind of colonial mind-set that dominates European thinking at the end of the 19th and right into the early 20th century.

According to Freud in Totem and Taboo, adult humans and more sophisticated societies have at least a tendency to grow away from these infantile, primitive origins. This is very clearly a colonial mind-set, and it serves a number of functions for Freud.

Among those is a very important move that he makes, which is about anti-Semitism. For much of the Europe of the 19th century, the other to the European is not so much the colonised other of, say, Africa; it’s the Jewish other. A long history of Christian anti-Semitism and what’s known as supersessionism, in which Christianity is held to replace Judaism, is the source of this deeply embedded view that the other to the European is the Jew. However, with the emancipation of the Jews in the mid-19th century, we see a move among some secular, highly educated European Jews, such as Freud, to identify the Jew as European and to make the other to the European the colonised black. You can see that at work in Totem and Taboo. Freud is basically writing for “we” Europeans, including the Jewish Europeans, and positioning as other the “primitive” African.

Psychoanalysts talk quite a lot about primitive emotions. Most of the time they mean something quite basic, an emotion which is absolutely fundamental: hate, love and especially envy – loving and destructive emotions that are foundational for the human psyche.

Along with this notion of the primitive, there are echoes of the colonial mind-set in which some people, and peoples, are held to be more primitive than others. We can also see it in the notion of cannibalism, which continues to be used today, especially among certain schools of psychoanalysis. To “cannibalise” something simply means to take it in and make it your own. It’s a psychic process which we’re very familiar with. Identification, for example, could be seen as part of that, where we become like another person, absorbing their ideas and making them our own.

But why use the term cannibal? It’s linked to the power of a certain kind of European fantasy of the late 19th century in which the black primitive other was also a cannibal: absorbing dangerously the ideas, but also the physical being, of its antagonist. Living primitively. Savagely incorporating the other.

It’s obvious that racism is something social, something structured within our societies. Institutions are racist. Sometimes whole societies such as apartheid South Africa are built on racism. So it’s a social phenomenon, but it’s equally obvious that people invest in it greatly. Racism becomes integral to their personality and their way of understanding the world. It’s as if they’re in love with their racism, which comes to mean more to them than almost anything else in their lives.

How can this be? Psychoanalysis has had a lot to say about this. It suggests, for example, that there might be aspects to all of us that are destructive to our personalities – things that we do or suffer that we can’t stand. So we need to somehow get rid of them psychically. That’s called projection. We push them out of ourselves.

Where do they go? Perhaps they go into socially derogated categories within our society, by which I mean groups already chosen for political, social and historical reasons to be available to receive this badness – the “blackness of our soul”, thought of in racist terms. Of course, there’s no reason why blackness should be destructive and negative, but negative ideas about blackness are already implanted in us from social and historical sources. Then it becomes organised and pushed out into the Black other in our society.

It’s very challenging, of course, to think of practical ways in which psychoanalysis can confront some of the huge issues that face us in contemporary society. Among these, I would place racist thought as being one of the primary and perhaps the primary destructive force.

In her recent work, the American social philosopher Judith Butler has been developing an idea she calls “grievability”. By that she means whether particular lives are seen as grievable. Would we grieve for them if they were lost? Butler argues that some lives are regarded as being more grievable than others.

Black Lives Matter has really brought this to the fore. There are certain lives that “don’t matter”, socially speaking. What Butler also suggests is that in addition to the social dimension of grievability, there is a kind of psychic dimension that we can understand through psychoanalysis. She points to the way in which each of us is vulnerable in all sorts of ways. For example, each of us is dependent in early life and so vulnerable to the ministrations that we get from those who look after us. Hopefully those ministrations are loving. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are even violent.

This vulnerability to the whim of the other is something we carry with us all through our lives. She also points out how our immersion in our own vulnerability can lead us to discount the vulnerability of others: because I am fragile and my life is precarious, I have no space for the vulnerability, fragility and precariousness of your life. Go away from me; leave me to live with my own vulnerability, and don’t threaten it.

She suggests that that kind of response to vulnerability is part of the problem of gaining grievability for others. We allow them grievability when we recognise that their lives are both vulnerable and valuable. We discount their grievability when we regard their lives as not worthy of mention, and also when we cannot imagine the vulnerability of their lives without somehow giving up our awareness of our own insecurity.